


living is harder

by GoldStarGrl



Category: Halt and Catch Fire
Genre: Angst, Gen, Season 3 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-19 17:51:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8219788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: He calls Gordon. He doesn't know what else to do. As soon as the G-men and the cops file out of his apartment, he calls Gordon and collapses back into bed.





	

He calls Gordon. He doesn't know what else to do. As soon as the G-men and the cops file out of his apartment, he calls Gordon and collapses back into bed, curled up on his side with a sheet pulled tight over his shoulder.

It's too sunny outside, too Bay Area Beautiful for what's staining the sidewalk below.

Joe squeezes his eyes shut but he can still feel the rays. He can't remember the last time he washed his sheets. The acid in his stomach gurgles and churns. 

* * *

Gordon makes him eat breakfast. He pieces together what happened, between what Joe managed to get out on the phone and the blue and red lights flashing outside, and when he arrives, he lets himself in without a word and heads straight for the kitchen.

Joe can hear him rummaging around in the cabinets for ten or fifteen minutes, before he's pushing the door to Joe's bedroom open with his back, a cup of coffee in one hand, two pieces of plain toast in the other.

"Here, eat something."

Joe pulls his knees up closer to his chest.

"Come on." Gordon says, perching on the edge of the mattress and extending the food towards Joe. "Just a little bite."

Sometimes Joe forgets Gordon is a dad until he does a thing like that.

He should be at home, with his actual children, not trying to spoon feed the rash, fraudulent, destructive _idiot_  who is sure to fade to the peripherals of Haley and Joanie's minds as they grow up, just another reason on the long list of why their parents Weren't Around.

He does eat, though, a little. With some gentle persuasion, Gordon even manages to get him to sit up.  

* * *

He can't go out into the living room until he's sure the coroner and the beat cops are gone, that the sidewalk beneath his balcony is clear. When he does, he just stares at his computer, at the note Ryan left him, left the world, the last message he sent anybody.

_You are not safe._

"Joe, you gotta stop reading that." Gordon chides from across the table. Gordon, who asked a few months before, in that stammering, heterosexual way, if Ryan was Joe's lover. Joe had laughed then.

He should've made Ryan sleep in his bed with him, last night. He should've curled around him and hung on until the sun came up.

* * *

The tiles on his bathroom floor are uncomfortably cold against his bare back, but he doesn't move. Let the sting be his penance.

He starts picking at his chest, at the scars and ripped-up flesh that would never fully heal from where the fence spokes drove through him. His mom let him fall and then she left, flicking the first in an endless line of dominos he couldn't stop or slow or divert. He fucked up, and down went another one.

He wonders if Ryan was scared, when he was falling, or if there wasn't enough time. There hadn't been for Joe.

* * *

He puts on a coat and scarf and pants not made of Egyptian cotton, swinging to the other extreme in terms of body temperature, and heads to the elevator. He can't stay in this apartment for another second. 

He makes it all the way to the front steps of his building, just outside the lobby doors. 

And his throat constricts and a thousand-pound pressure starts leaning against his chest because Ryan is _dead_ and Gordon is dying and Cameron left him for someone more normal and stable and soon he's going to be alone, again, and maybe he wasn't meant for this life, this world, maybe he wasn't supposed to survive his fall either.

He ends up by the bridge, one of the few good swell spots in the city, without knowing fully how he got there. His face may be wet, he can't really tell with the wind and the spray off the ocean whipping against it. He watches another surfer, farther out then he ever paddled, cutting swooping lines in the wave with his board.

The water is cold this time of year. The current is so strong. Joe's stronger, but not by as much as he used to be. Just barely. All it would take is one good riptide to pull him under.

After all, what kind of person survived two falls in a row?


End file.
